” This is the fourth story in our four-part series examining your digital trail and who potentially has access to it. It was co-reported by G.W. Schulz from the Center for Investigative Reporting. Yesterday, we examined your Fourth Amendment rights and how some believe the digital age has weakened them. Today we see how government officials and private attorneys can use your online data in politics and courtrooms.

Here’s a question for the digital age: If you are one of those people who say, “I’ve done nothing wrong; I’ve got nothing to hide,” do you have any reason to worry that someone might try to use your digital records against you?

We posed that question to John Dean, a man who has become immortalized in U.S. history books as President Richard Nixon’s White House lawyer. His answer: “Think about the Nixon Enemies List.”

Dean says the history of Nixon’s Enemies List, which surfaced during the Watergate scandal, shows that even when people have done nothing wrong and think they have nothing to hide, unscrupulous government officials can still dig up personal information and use it to try to smear people.”

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the libertarian CATO Institute, calls this era “a golden age of surveillance.”Before computers, it took a huge amount of time and work to try to find dirt on somebody. For instance, the FBI tried to discredit Martin Luther King Jr. They wiretapped his phones, bugged his hotel rooms, and then had to listen to hundreds of hours of recordings. The Watergate scandal started unraveling after operatives physically broke into the Democratic Committee’s headquarters to plant bugs and photograph documents — and got caught. But Sanchez says the computer age lets you find intimate parts of a person’s life right in front of you, on a screen. And you can search and analyze it almost instantly, with a few clicks. “

” The US government has chargedEdward Snowden with three felonies, including two under the Espionage Act, the 1917 statute enacted to criminalize dissent against World War I. My priority at the moment is working on our next set of stories, so I just want to briefly note a few points about this.

Prior to Barack Obama’s inauguration, there were a grand total of three prosecutions of leakers under the Espionage Act (including the prosecution of Dan Ellsberg by the Nixon DOJ). That’s because the statute is so broad that even the US government has largely refrained from using it. But during the Obama presidency, there are now seven such prosecutions: more than double the number under all prior US presidents combined. How can anyone justify that?”

The irony is obvious: the same people who are building a ubiquitous surveillance system to spy on everyone in the world, including their own citizens, are now accusing the person who exposed it of “espionage”. It seems clear that the people who are actually bringing “injury to the United States” are those who are waging war on basic tenets of transparency and secretly constructing a mass and often illegal and unconstitutional surveillance apparatus aimed at American citizens – and those who are lying to the American people and its Congress about what they’re doing- rather than those who are devoted to informing the American people that this is being done.

The Obama administration leaks classified information continuously. They do it to glorify the President, or manipulate public opinion, or even to help produce a pre-election propaganda film about the Osama bin Laden raid. The Obama administration does not hate unauthorized leaks of classified information. They are more responsible for such leaks than anyone.

What they hate are leaks that embarrass them or expose their wrongdoing. Those are the only kinds of leaks that are prosecuted. It’s a completely one-sided and manipulative abuse of secrecy laws. It’s all designed to ensure that the only information we as citizens can learn is what they want us to learn because it makes them look good. The only leaks they’re interested in severely punishing are those that undermine them politically.The “enemy” they’re seeking to keep ignorant with selective and excessive leak prosecutions are not The Terrorists or The Chinese Communists. It’s the American people.“

” He’s compared himself to Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, evoked nostalgia for John F. Kennedy, sought to emulate Ronald Reagan, (belatedly) praised George W. Bush, and enlisted the assistance of Bill Clinton in his 2012 re-election effort, but as his second term stumbles along, the president with whom Barack Obama finds himself being compared is Richard M. Nixon.

“I’ll let you guys engage in those comparisons,” he replied when asked at a rainy Rose Garden appearance Thursday how he felt about the Nixon parallel. “You can go ahead and read the history, I think, and draw your own conclusions.”

This response echoed language employed earlier in the week by Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney. “I can tell you,” the White House press secretary told reporters, “that the people who make those kinds of comparisons need to check their history.”

Richard Milhous Nixon was thin-skinned, felt persecuted by the opposition party, had a penchant for classifying political adversaries — and journalists — as “enemies,” and tried to control his image so fiercely that, ultimately, zealous aides committed illegal acts to further his re-election.

But even before that had happened — and before Nixon himself began directing a coverup — truth had become a casualty of his administration. This is the parallel between Richard Nixon and Barack Obama.”

Richard Nixon’s White House had Chuck Colson compile an “enemies list” of people it believed were opposing the Nixon administration’s politics. The purpose of the list was to encourage the IRS to audit and harass those listed. The IRS refused.

Fast forward 30 years. President Obama rails against the tea party movement. His Department of Homeland Security suggested early in his administration that groups that oppose big-government spending should be looked into as possible terrorist threats. And, surprise, the IRS set up a special unit to harass tea party groups that oppose big government. Obama’s White House claims not to have sent a memo asking the bureaucrats to do this. It didn’t have to.

This is an unprecedented level of corruption. Didn’t anyone in the IRS object to these attacks? It seems like everyone involved was a willing participant in this abuse of power on the president’s behalf. This isn’t one corrupt politician wishing the IRS would annoy his “enemies.” This is a good chunk of the federal government willingly bending to the will of one politician. This is how the city of Chicago works. Everyone knows what to do without telltale memos.”

“The Tea Party people have known about this and were working on this,” Will continued. “But they said — it was just some odd underlings out in Cincinnati who did this and there was no political motive whatever involved. Now the question is, how stupid do they think we are? Just imagine, Donna Brazile, if the George W. Bush administration had an IRS underling, he’s out in Cincinnati, of course, saying we’re going to target groups with the word ‘progressive’ in their title. We’d have all hell breaking loose.”

Will noted that one of the items in the 1973 impeachment articles of then-President Richard Nixon, which ultimately led to his resignation, described the Nixon administration’s use of the power of income tax audits in a “discriminatory matter.” “

To understand the moral context of the IRS’ admission that it improperly targeted conservative Tea Party and Patriot nonprofits during the 2012 presidential campaign, it helps to know that Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have something in common besides twice being elected to the Oval Office: All three appear to have been quite willing to use the most intrusive powers of the federal government against their political opposition.

Unlike the Nixon scandal, there is as yet no evidence that Obama or one of his top aides ordered the IRS to go after the conservative groups, but then it was only on Friday that Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS tax exemption unit, admitted the “inappropriate” actions while answering a question during an American Bar Association conference.”

” A former Richard Nixon aide and Republican strategist Roger Stone, 61, said last week that he will publish a book in October which gives evidence that former President Lyndon B. Johnson masterminded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The Daily Caller reports that the book is being published in time for the 50-year anniversary of JFK’s assassination.”

He claims that Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson had a “documented” relationship with Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald. According to Stone, the relationship dates back years before Ruby, whose real name was Jacob Leon Rubenstein, killed Oswald in the basement of Dallas police headquarters in 1963.”

” On January 9, 1913, Richard Milhous Nixon was born inside a bedroom of his family’s modest Yorba Linda, California, house. On the 100th anniversary of the birth of America’s 37th president, explore 10 surprising facts about the only U.S. president to resign from office.

1. Lee Harvey Oswald may have plotted to assassinate Nixon.
In the early morning of November 22, 1963, Richard Nixon rode through Dallas to the airport to fly home after attending a Pepsi-Cola board meeting. Nixon saw the preparations for the motorcade that hours later would carry John F. Kennedy, the man who defeated him for the presidency three years prior, on the streets of the city’s downtown. After Nixon landed in New York, he learned that Kennedy had been gunned down in that motorcade. In a further coincidence, the wife of Lee Harvey Oswald testified to the Warren Commission that in April 1963 the alleged assassin read a local newspaper report, tucked a pistol in his belt, and told her, “Nixon is coming. I want to go and have a look.” After locking him in a bathroom, Oswald’s wife convinced him to turn over his gun. The account was puzzling, since Nixon was not in Dallas in April 1963 and no newspaper mentioned any visit. “

“This is what happens when the dollar is backed by “the full faith and credit of the United States” and not the barbarous relic. Nixon abandons gold in 1971 and inflation launches skyward. It’s hard to believe that for most of the history of the United States inflation was next to 0%.

That the rate of crony capitalism has launched into the stratosphere at a commensurate rate with inflation is no coincidence. Fiat money is the mother’s milk of crony capitalism.”

” “I have made a study of different cover-ups – the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and Iran-Contra. I’ve never seen anything like it. I think this is probably the greatest cover-up, in my memory anyway,” the Oklahoma Republican said in an interview Saturday night on Fox News.